For Europe's elected political leaders, the debt and currency crisis has taken an extraordinarily heavy toll. Of 17 governments in the eurozone using the single currency, 10 have been drummed out of office in little more than a year, more often than not directly because of the crisis.

The mass voter rebellion against incumbents began in February last year as bailout candidate Ireland went to the polls. Fianna Fáil's hapless Brian Cowen quit before his party suffered the worst ever defeat of an Irish government and he was replaced by Fine Gael's Enda Kenny.

The voters' insurrection affected both those countries in financial meltdown and those having to stump up to bail them out and save the euro. Finns bristled at having to help what they saw as feckless foreigners, kicking out the Kiviniemi government in April last year and bringing in a new coalition.

José Sócrates, the Socialist prime minister of Portugal, another bailout recipient, was next for a kicking in June, losing to the centre-right's Pedro Passos Coelho. The same happened next door in Spain in November as Mariano Rajoy inherited a poison chalice from José Luis Zapatero.

The tempo picked up. The same month, Italy's seemingly insuperable Silvio Berlusconi bowed to the inevitable and made way for an unelected caretaker government headed by Mario Monti pending elections next year. George Papandreou had already quit in Greece, also handing over to a caretaker administration, after exasperating the big EU powers by trying to call a referendum on the terms of Greece's bailout.

Slovakia's government under Iveta Radicová fell in October after balking at funding the bailouts on the grounds that it is poorer than those it was paying and was replaced by the leftist Robert Fico as prime minister. A parallel government crisis, tangentially related to the euro, sparked early elections and another change of regime in Slovenia.

Last month the centre-right Dutch government also collapsed, unable to agree spending cuts to comply with the euro rules next year. Early elections are due in September.

Then last weekend Greece vented its rage on the traditional political class, shredding support for the two big parties, while France turned Nicolas Sarkozy into a rare French political leader – a one-term president.

The dangers of democracy do not, however, affect some of the biggest players in the euro crisis: — – in Brussels and in Frankfurt. Key leaders such as Olli Rehn and José Manuel Barroso at the European commission in Brussels or Herman van Rompuy at the European Council need not fear the voter.

Austerity has been the main prescription across Europe for dealing with the continent's nearly three-year-old debt crisis, brought on by too much government spending. But what does it mean for the average European?